


Brown Paper Packages

by nightwalker



Category: Avengers (Comics), Iron Man (Comic)
Genre: Canon Era, Friendship, Gen, Long-Distance Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-05
Updated: 2015-02-05
Packaged: 2018-03-10 14:22:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3293636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightwalker/pseuds/nightwalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rhodey never really knows what Tony’s going to do from one month to the next, but there’s always another package waiting for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brown Paper Packages

**Author's Note:**

> Fic written in response to a prompt I got on Tumblr: Rhodey is off on his first deployment. Tony makes it his mission to send him helpful and creative care packages.
> 
> Set before and during Tony's abduction.

The first one was actually pretty thoughtful. Rhodey’s mom had sent him a care package, a huge box full of home made cookies and granola bars, bottles of sunscreen, magazines, hard candies and decks of playing cards. It must have cost her a fortune to put together and mail and the guys in Rhodey’s unit are suitably appreciative. Packed inside the box is a smaller one, with his name written in Tony’s familiar block letters. Rhodey saves that one for last and opens it in the relative privacy of his bunk just before lights out. It’s a pile of comics and four little hand-held electronic games. They have the SI logo on the back, but Rhodey’s never seen them before, which makes him suspect Tony had sent them from his own collection of prototypes.

Wherever they came from, they’re a hit with the guys. Not that Rhodey lets anyone play until he’s beaten each one.

They pop up here and there. A box full of condoms and lube ( _not_ sent as part of his mother’s care package, thank God) one month, the next Tony sends him a hundred teddy bears to hand out to the local kids. Sometimes it’s porn, quality stuff that Rhodey’s squad is a little too eager to get their hands on. Sometimes it’s five hundred back issues of _Batman_. Rhodey never really knows what Tony’s going to do from one month to the next, but there’s always another package waiting for him.

Sometimes they pile up. Sometimes he’s not in a place where he can get mail, or at least not where anyone outside the military is allowed to find him. When he gets back, there’s always the appropriate number of packages waiting for him. He can tell how worried Tony is about him by how sentimental the most recent package is. One time, after he’d been incommunicado for weeks, Tony sent their MIT year book and he’d written hundreds of little notes throughout, all of them reminders about some class they had shared or some person they had known or some trouble they had gotten into. “Remember this?” Tony had scrawled across Tiberius Stone’s smirking face. “He tried to have you expelled for cheating so I threatened to report him for corrupting a minor and he tried to beat me up so you showed up with the entire Air ROTC and they chased him halfway across campus.”

He’d gotten a hold of a satellite phone that night and spoke to Tony in person for the first time in months.

As Tony gets older, the packages get a little more mature. He starts sending video game consoles and blu-ray players, boxes full of DVDs and ipods. Sometimes hundreds of clean socks and underwear and - after Rhodey had pointed out that there were women in his unit too, by the way - women’s cotton briefs and hundreds of packages of tampons. 

Body armor. Stark Industries had always made weapons, but the body armor that starts coming in Rhodey’s care packages is top of the line, highest quality stuff and it has the SI logo on it. Other units start wearing it years after Rhodey’s does. 

Tony sends him boxes packed with dry ice and gelato. Boxes with an entire season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on VHS, each one labelled in Tony’s precise handwriting.

Sometimes he just sends hundreds of letters, some of them just little notes scrawled on cocktail napkins, some of them dozens of pages long, all of them addressed to _The Rhodester, Rhodey Dearest, Honey Bear, Golden Graham, Turtle Dove_.

And then one day Tony disappears after an insurgent attack. The soldiers assigned to guard him have been gunned down and a blood splattered suit jacket is balled up by the side of the road.

Three months go by without a package. Rhodey checks - he fucking _checks_ because if Tony could get free, or give some sign that he’s okay, that might be how he does it - but there’s nothing. Rhodey himself barely leaves the dessert, burns every favor he’s ever been owed, begs a dozen more from every commanding officer he’s ever known, and they let him stay to lead the search for three long desperate months until even Rhodey is starting to think that this is less of a search and rescue, and more of a recovery mission.

And then Tony is back, a goddamn mirage in the middle of the desert. He’s half-dead and twenty pounds lighter than the last time Rhodey saw him, but he’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

"You don't write, you don't call," Rhodey says because anything more serious sticks in his throat. 

Tony is smiling at him, soot smearing with the blood on his face. He’s burnt red from the sun and it’ll hurt like hell soon. But he’s smiling like Rhodey’s the best thing he’s ever seen. “I realized I forgot your care package,” he says as he slumps against Rhodey’s shoulder, his hands gripping the back of Rhodey’s uniform so tight that he’s half-convinced he can hear the fabric ripping. “Thought I should come deliver it in person.”

"You’re all the care package I need." Rhodey lays one hand flat against the side of Tony’s head and presses a fierce kiss to one of his temples. "Jesus, you dumb fuck. I thought you were _dead_.” He starts to laugh, just a little, nerves and tension easing for the first time in months. “You are the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my entire _life_ , man.”

"Aww, Honey bunch," Toney says, and that’s when the rest of the team catches up with them. 

Exactly a month later a small box arrives with the base mail. It has Tony’s writing, as familiar as Rhodey’s own, across the front. 

Inside are photos, hundreds of them. And each one is of Tony.

 _Dear Pumpkin,_ the letter reads, _since I am the most beautiful thing in your life, it seems wrong to force you to go for months at a time without basking in my beauty. PS: the nudes are toward the bottom, I know how nosy your squad is._

Two of Rhodey’s men are already digging through the box, hoping for Tony’s usual treats. Rhodey figures they deserve what they’re about to find.


End file.
